Tales of Phantasia

Tales of Phantasia. A name that any SNES gamer with any knowledge of import titles should know. It is effectively the starting point of the Tales Of series of games, and its original release and almost every single rerelease never saw the light of day outside of Japan (a trend Namco seem all too keen to carry on - come on, we like RPGs too!). Finally the game sees a localized version on the Gameboy Advance. While there are certainly some good stuff in here there are also numerous glaring problems that I am left to wonder if all those fans of the original were simply bonkers or if the porting job here is just terrible.

I suppose everything starts off promising enough. Ignore the boring start where we can a rather uninspired title screen and the GBA sprites do possess some level of charm to them. With the amount of time the system has been out Namco have taken advantage of the specs to produce a wonderful detailed world. The overworld has a scrolling effect similar to that...